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Perpendicular storage coming in 2006

Perpendicular storage is coming to a computer near you, perhaps sooner than …

Your friend the traditional hard drive may be undergoing changes soon. No, we're not talking about the threat that flash storage poses to the dominant storage medium, though that's an emerging player on the scene. No, our favorite plattered friend may be reorienting itself in a literal sense.

Hard drive "bits" are essentially longitudinal in orientation. Platters are arranged so that bits lay on them in a circular fashion, end-to-end, much in the way you might lay bricks down to form a circle. One problem with this approach is that as densities are increased and magnetic bits on the recording medium get closer and closer together, you run the risk of a bit "flipping" by being too close to another bit carrying a charge. In general, this puts constraints on how much data you can get on a platter because you have to balance the positioning of the bits on the recording medium.

Enter perpendicular storage, which is poised to run the table by end of 2006. If you imagine, for a moment, that the bits on a hard drive platter are like bricks, and that the bricks have to be separated by a certain amount of distance in order to safely retain their charge, you can see a possible solution. Rather than lay the bricks on the side with the most surface area, why not put them upright instead? Now in the space where 5 bricks sat laying flat (the way you would build a wall), you can fit 7 bits standing upright. Insta-density boost! And the benefits don't stop there. Because there are more bits in the same space, a drive can theoretically read and writer fast because more bits spin by in a typical rotation of the hard drive's platter. And if we're talking about mobile applications, this could lead to marginal power savings, because more can be done with less.

This month Seagate is letting the perpendicular storage dogs loose. Today they have announced the release of the first perpendicular storage products designed for end users. The Momentus 5400.3 is the first notebook hard drive to use the technology, and offers 160GB of storage in the same amount of space as previous 120GB optionsa boost of over 30 percent, offering 132 Gbits per square inch. The drive is already shipping, and carries an MSRP of US$325. It is currently limited to Ultra ATA/100 interfaces, but Serial ATA support is planned for later this year.

Industry experts say that this new approach to storing data will eventually result in truly impressive gains in storage density, perhaps as much as five-fold. Seagate and many others are expected to transition most if not all of their product lines to perpendicular storage within the next 12 months.

Ken Fisher
Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation. Emailken@arstechnica.com//Twitter@kenfisher